Aerial Seams: THK Cape Town

The artists in Aerial Seams approach the horizon not as a boundary but as a threshold,  a living seam where sea and sky dissolve into one another, and where self, matter, and emotion converge. Through their diverse practices, Amy Rusch, Karla Nixon, Kate Schärf, and Klaré van Heerden (KVMH) explore this in-between as a site of transformation, revealing the horizon as a metaphor for perception, time, and the porousness of being.

Amy Rusch (b. 1990) works through processes of cutting, binding, and stitching to translate lived and elemental experiences into tactile form. Her layered plastics and stitched threads hold the resonance of deep time,  where gesture meets geological rhythm. In her work, the horizon hums as vibration rather than image, suggesting connection across scales: human, ecological, and cosmic.

Karla Nixon (b. 1990) engages paper as both fragile and enduring, constructing delicate, sculptural works that reflect on transience, memory, and belonging. Through acts of cutting and reconstruction, Nixon transforms paper into landscape, a terrain of impermanence and renewal. Her works meditate on the emotional and historical weight of place, asking how we inhabit the spaces we make and how they, in turn, shape us.

Kate Schärf (b. 1993, Pietermaritzburg) draws on her deep attunement to nature to explore tranquillity and perception. Her paintings and drawings, inspired by organic and botanical forms, invite the viewer into quiet introspection. Through soothing palettes and layered mark-making, she constructs “foliagescapes” that blur the line between representation and reverie. In her recent explorations of forest imagery, Schärf evokes the horizon as a psychological space, one that holds the possibility of refuge, mystery, and imagination.

Klaré van Heerden (KVMH) (b. 1999) turns toward the ocean as both mirror and metaphor. Working in charcoal and acrylic, she translates emotional states, grief, stillness, and transformation ,  into visual meditations on the sea. Rooted in philosophy and psychoanalysis, her Ocean Series draws on the concept of the “oceanic feeling,” where self and world dissolve into unity. In her hands, the horizon becomes a site of dissolution and renewal, an expanse where the boundaries of the self blur into the infinite.

Together, the artists of Aerial Seams trace the horizon as a mutable field of encounter,  a seam between inner and outer worlds, between material and metaphysical.